Friday, April 8, 2016

Updated August 2017A
study by Ruben Durante and Ekaterina
Zhuravskaya examines the timing relationship between significant attacks by
Israeli forces on Palestine and Syria and important non-Israeli news coverage in the
United States to see whether there is a link between the two that could be used
to distract both the media and the public. This is particularly pertinent
given the spate of stabbings across Israel in recent months that have received
relatively little coverage by the Western mainstream media and the comments by Israeli Intelligence Minister
following the killing of an American citizen:

"We are in the midst of a war against ISIS-style Muslim extremist
terror. We are in an emergency situation. There are murderers here who
are motivated by hatred and we cannot allow Jews to continue to get harmed.
There is an intifada of incitement. We must restore deterrence, so I must ask
all the higher than thou who scold us to understand our current reality."

This posting is also pertinent given the March 2016 street execution of an obviously unthreatening Palestinian by a member of the IDF as shown here (1 minute 54 second mark):Given that it could be classified as a war crime, the incident has received relatively little coverage by the mainstream media.The authors of the study begin by
noting that governments are accountable for their actions "to the extent
that the public is informed about their actions" and that the mainstream
media is the main tool by which governments are held accountable to their
citizens. In this 24 hour a day 7 day a week news world that we now live
in, news organizations have a multitude of story lines to cover. Yet, as
is clearly apparent, when a major unpredictable news event occurs (i.e.
an airplane crash, a major earthquake in Japan etcetera), news networks and
online versions of mainstream newspapers devote most of their attention to that
single event, pretty much paying lip service to anything else that happens in
the world. While no one can predict the timing of human-made or natural
disasters, there are some predictable news events including key sports
events like the Olympics, FIFA World Cup, Super Bowl as well as political
events including elections, speeches by important figures and the State of the
Union Address which draws the attention of most media consumers. These
events lead to what are termed high news pressure days. With that
reality in mind, the authors look at how the presence of newsworthy items
crowds out new coverage of unpopular actions taken by governments, focussing
specifically on the seemingly endless Israel-Palestine conflict and whether the
timing of military actions by both sides coincide with other newsworthy events.
In both nations, there is a great deal of concern about international
public opinion, particularly the opinion of Americans as it relates to civilian
casualties. This is exemplified in these comments from Benjamin Netanyahu during
an interview with Wolf Blitzer in July 2014:

"They're not only
targeting our cities. They're deliberately firing thousands of
rockets. They have already fired 2,000 rockets in the last few days on
our cities. You can imagine this. It's not only that. And
they wanted to kill as many of our six million Israelis who are targeted as
they could....Terrorists pop up there, try to murder civilians, kidnap
Israelis, as they did with Gilad Shalit. So we're taking action right now
to neutralize those tunnels. And we will continue the action as long as
is necessary."

"We're sad for every
civilian casualty. They're not intended. This is the difference
between us. The Hamas deliberately targets civilians and deliberately
hides behind civilians. They embed their rocketeers, their rocket caches,
their - their other weaponry from where - which they fire - which they use to
fire on us in civilian areas. What choice do we have? We have to
protect ourselves. So we try to target the rocketeers. We do.
And all civilian casualties are unintended by us, but intended by Hamas.
They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can, because somebody said
they use - it's gruesome. They use telegenically dead Palestinians for
their cause. They want the more dead the better."

The authors
hypothesize that Israeli authorities wish to avoid media coverage of their
military operations if those operations are expected to result in civilian
casualties since this can and has resulted in criticism from human rights
organizations and increases the risk of alienation from the United States.
In the case of Palestine, their incentives for timing their attacks is
less clear cut since attacks by Palestine that result in Israeli civilian
casualties can have a two-pronged impact:

1.) they can sway
international opinion against Palestine.

2.) they can result in
increased popular support for terrorist organizations within Palestine.

As a database,
the authors use a daily time series on the occurrence and severity of
Israeli military attacks on the West Bank and Gaza Strip and attacks
by Palestinian militant groups on Israeli territory between September
29, 2000 and November 24, 2011. Over this time frame, there were 7690
fatalities on both sides of which 6401 were Palestinian. This included
Operation Cast Lead which took place in December 2008 and January 2009 which
accounted for nearly 18 percent of all fatalities as shown on this figure:

The data includes
information on the number of attacks and resulting casualties carried out
by each side on each day. The authors then compare this data to the
presence of other newsworthy events on international media which is
measured as the time devoted to the top three news storied that are not related
to either Israel or Palestine as covered on the evening news for three American
television networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC and CNN's around the clock news
coverage. The authors observed that when attacks between the two nations
reach a level of severity, the public's attention to the conflict is increased
and the daily volume of Google searches for the search topic
"Israeli-Palestinian conflict" increases by 35 percent if all three
networks feature a story about a particular attack on prime time news.
This tells us that media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
affects the attention of the public to the conflict.

The authors' main
hypothesis that Israel times its attacks to other newsworthy events that
may crowd out coverage of the attacks involves a concept termed "news
pressure". Since the three main networks have only 30 minutes to
communicate the days news, higher interest news items can crowd out stories
that are either repetitive (i.e. a drawn out conflict like the War on Terror)
or mundane.

The timing of news
coverage of attacks is very important and the authors note that there is a
timing difference to news releases by each side in the conflict. It is
apparent that the Israelis behave strategically when it comes to releasing news
about Palestinian attacks on Israelis. Israelis bring international
journalists to the site of an attack right after the attack takes place (i.e.
same day coverage), allowing them to film the site and interview witnesses
because they realize the importance of such coverage on international opinion.
In the case of Israeli attacks on Palestine, there are generally very few
if any international journalists on the ground immediately after the attack
because of the dangers involved (i.e. next day coverage). In the case of
Palestinian deaths, funerals occur on the day following death and the crowds of
onlookers and mourners provides ample protection for journalists against
Israeli attacks meaning that most news coverage of Palestinian casualties
occurs the day after the attack. The authors observe that, in general,
next day coverage is less favourable to Israel, largely because it is more
personal and more emotionally charged and they note that, on average, twice as
many stories about the conflict appear on the news on the day of an
Israeli attack than on the next day. The analysis shows that Israeli
attacks are more likely to occur prior to days with very high news pressure
driven by clearly predictable events.

Here is the author's
conclusion:

"Taken together, our
findings suggest that Israeli authorities behave strategically in timing their
attacks to predictable international newsworthy events in order to minimize
negative publicity abroad, and that such strategy is sophisticated in that it
takes into account both the technology of news reporting in war areas and the
cognitive psychology of information transmission and retention."

Back in 2001, this is what Benjamin Netanyahu had to say about America during an informal discussion with Israeli citizens:

"Netanyahu:...The
Arabs are currently focusing on a war of terror and they think it will break
us. The main thing, first of all, is to hit them. Not just one blow, but blows
that are so painful that the price will be too heavy to be borne. The price is
not too heavy to be borne, now. A broad attack on the Palestinian Authority. To
bring them to the point of being afraid that everything is collapsing...

Woman: Wait
a moment, but then the world will say "how come you're conquering
again?"

Netanyahu:
the world won't say a thing. The world will say we're defending.

Woman:
Aren't you afraid of the world, Bibi?

Netanyahu:
Especially today, with America. I know what America is. America is something
that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction.

1 comment:

Sites that daily report the truth of what is happening on both sides are needed. The truth is what we want to know. We understand from reading above that Israeli laws control much of what happens on the ground with respect to journalism, so the regularity of reporting varies from one side to the other. Please name a site that reports the truth on both sides as it becomes available. The mainstream sites you name above remain unused by us for many years now.

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I have been an avid follower of the world's political and economic scene since the great gold rush of 1979 - 1980 when it seemed that the world's economic system was on the verge of collapse. I am most concerned about the mounting level of government debt and the lack of political will to solve the problem. Actions need to be taken sooner rather than later when demographic issues will make solutions far more difficult. As a geoscientist, I am also concerned about the world's energy future; as we reach peak cheap oil, we need to find viable long-term solutions to what will ultimately become a supply-demand imbalance.